Another arty update

I think I told you that I was working on finding some art for my bathroom.  It had been quite the struggle to find something that fit this oddly-shaped, long, blank wall.

I didn't want it to be too overwhelming in terms of color or size because I worried it would make the very small space feel even more cramped.  I tossed around a bunch of ideas, from just painting that wall an accent color, to hanging 3 or 4 large nature photos, to stenciling on the wall, to having some hanging plants or something.  Originally, this was where the Loteria pictures were intended to go, but when I got them in there, the colors just seemed to be too much for the small space.

Eventually, I found these simple bird-shaped things made out of bent wood from West Elm.  I wish I could attach the photo from the website here, but it looks like they must have taken it down.  Here's what they looked like laid out on my floor after I took them out of the box.

Anyway, what I liked about them was that since it was a set of three birds that were all slightly differently shaped and were different sizes, I could space them out over the wall in any way that felt right, without worrying about being concerned about spacing and symmetry. 

My first obstacle was to figure out HOW to hang them.  The only things attached to the birds were these little gold hoops.

I took a trip to the hardware store to see if they had any brilliant ideas of what to do with them, because I was kind of stumped.  Surely they didn't intend to just use regular ugly nails to hang these on?  Unfortunately, the hardware store guy I talked was zero percent helpful.  I mean, I guess he tried, but he was suggesting I use these ugly, bulky brackets, or fishing wire or something.  I finally just decided to try my best with what I could find.  I ended up locating these tiny little finishing nails that I thought might be just unobtrusive enough to do the trick.

When it came time to hang the birds, I used my favorite technique, which works best when I'm hanging things by myself.  I made little cutouts of the birds, taped them up and started moving them around on the wall until I found an arrangement I liked.  I eventually settled on this angled arrangement. 

I basically eyeballed their placement, although I did do a little bit of measuring to make sure they were roughly centered on the wall and that the space between the birds was more or less consistent.  When I drew the cutouts, I marked dots where the nails should go, so that once they were taped to the wall, I literally just put nails in where the holes were.  Here's the first one:

This first one showed me that the finishing nails were going to work pretty well.  They're very small, and as long as I drove the nail in just far enough for the gold loop to hang on, they were perfectly sturdy and unobtrusive.  Here's what it looked like from the side.

So I kept going and once I got them all up the wall, here was the finished product.

Yay!  I really like all the wood tones in this room, and so far, I'm enjoying the birds.  The only potential downside is that from certain angles, the wall still looks kind of bare, so I'm going to see if that changes over time or if continues to nag at me.  I think it's a very fine line in here, where if you add too much in, I think it might just feel claustrophobic.

One thing I do quite like is the new view I have when I walk by the bathroom in the hallway.  I get to see this!

Cute!  So with this, I'm thinking the bathroom is done for the foreseeable future.  Feels good to check it off the list!  Let's revisit the before and after one last time.

A new idea for the windows

I recently fell a little further down the home improvement rabbit hole with my discovery of Houzz.com.  Dangerously fun.  I was playing around on there looking at kitchens, since that's my most exciting project to daydream about, but I didn't really have anything specific I was looking to do. 

One of the pictures I stumbled on was this one:

http://www.houzz.com/photos/7602812/Sunny-Pennsylvania-Kitchen-Update-transitional-kitchen-philadelphia

The kitchen didn't totally blow me away, but the window shades really caught my attention.  I really liked the natural texture, and I liked how light and airy they felt.  The scale of the kitchen in the photo kind of reminded me of mine, so I started thinking about how it would look in my space.  I have these white shutters on all of the windows in the main living spaces on my first floor:

It's hard to take great pictures of them because they do actually let in a fair amount of sun.  I mostly leave them closed because having them open to let in full sunlight means that they extend out from the window like 7 or 8 inches, so nothing can be too close to the wall.  They've been nice things to have the whole time I've lived here, and I've never really thought about replacing them because I couldn't think of something I liked better - until now.

With the addition of the wooden frames of the Loteria pictures, I'm now thinking it would be nice to add some more of that natural texture with some natural woven shades like the ones in the Houzz.com picture.  It would not only tie in with those, but with the fabric-covered light fixture I have over the dining table.  PLUS, the major benefit would be that the windows could then be completely open every day, letting in more light without having to sacrifice space around the wall.

I'm not quite ready to pull the trigger on it yet, and even if I was, there's approximately 1 million options to choose from, so I took the next best step today.  I ordered some free samples from Smith & Noble, which should be arriving late in the month so I can start playing around with those and see which color or fabric would look the best. 

La Loteria

Back when I went to visit my friend Alex in San Antonio in May, I picked up some great new art.  You've already met Zelda the Pig:

The other stuff I got is art based on this Mexican version of Bingo called "Loteria." 

I saw it in the same store that we found Zelda, and knew I had to get some.  There were a ton of different pictures to choose from - the question was which ones!  I originally thought I'd get them to go in my bathroom, so I was looking for something with the greens and blues in the shower curtain, so these are the ones I picked out.

These all had the colors I liked, and I also got a kick out of getting a couple that had instruments in them.  And I like frogs.  Not sure why I got the scorpion except that I really loved the yellow background.

Well, when I got them home and started playing around with them, it just didn't quite make sense in the bathroom.  It wasn't terrible, but I think with all the color it just felt a little too "fiesta" for me in there.  So I did what I always do, which was to sit around and stare at it for a while.  And this time, it was like...months.  I just couldn't make a decision - I knew I wanted to have them somewhere in the house, but couldn't figure out where the best place for them was.  Leave it to someone else to figure it out! 

My friend Ellen came over to check things out, and helpfully suggested that they might look nice against the green wall in the dining area and kitchen.  There's a big wall where this art was:

Eventually...after delaying a while longer...I finally took care of trying out Ellen's suggestion today.  My first roadblock was that 3 of the 4 pictures had the same frame and were the same size, but one (my beloved frog), was a slightly different shade of wood and slightly smaller in the frame.  Here you can see the difference:

My original plan had been to make it a 2x2 postage stamp kind of arrangement, but that clearly wouldn't work any longer if one of these things was not like the other.  I cut out some paper versions of all four of them, and played around with other arrangements on the wall.  I tried a bunch of stuff, including trying to figure out whether I could hang 3 of them together, and the last one somewhere else, but finally I stumbled on an arrangement I liked.

This one had the advantage of distracting the eye a little bit from the odd-man-out frame, and didn't draw too much attention to its different size, so I thought it was a good solution, and was a little bit more interesting to look at anyway.

So my next two projects are to spackle over some of the old nail holes in the green wall...

...and then to find a new home for the pictures that were previously there.  More on that next time!